Richard came in very late and then didn’t surface until midday, which was something to be thankful for. Once he was up he spent his time on the phone, he had a new videophone that Martin admired politely (“Yeah, she’s a sexy mother, isn’t she?” Richard agreed), even though he thought it was odd and rather dumpy and reminded him of a Star Trek communicator. Richard had downloaded the theme song from Robin Hood, the old fifties television program, as his ringtone, and the sound of it, rendered tinnily tiny and stupid, was slowly driving Martin crazy. As an antidote Martin himself had recently downloaded Birdsong and had been pleasantly surprised by how authentic the birds sounded.
Looking round, he found a clock behind him on the wall that said it was half-past one. It felt much later, the day had lost its shape, distorted under the weight of unexpected reality.
Martin had read a spiteful review of Richard Mott’s show in the Scotsman that said, among other things, “Richard Mott’s humor creaks with banality these days. He hashes up the same old tired material he was using ten years ago.The world has moved on, but Richard Mott hasn’t.” Martin felt embarrassed just reading it. He couldn’t mention to Richard that he’d seen it because that would mean they would both have to face the awfulness of it all. Martin had acquired enough bad reviews himself to know the abysmal feelings they generated.
“I never read my reviews,” Richard volunteered morosely after his opening night. Martin didn’t believe him. Everyone read their own reviews. It was some years since Richard had “done the Festival,” and whatever feelings he had once had about Edinburgh (he had been gloriously successful here at the beginning of his career) had now turned mostly to antipathy. “You see, it’s a great city,” he said to one of the “some people from London” during their flesh-feeding frenzy in the phobia-inducing, crowded Indian restaurant. “Fantastic to look at and all that, but it has no libido. And obviously you have to blame Knox for that.” Martin hated the way Richard said “Knox” with such offhand familiarity. He felt like saying, “Knox might have been a dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, but he was our dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, not yours.”
“Exactly!” another one of them said. He was wearing narrow spectacles with thick black rims and smoked even more than Richard. Martin, a spectacle wearer since the age of eight, wore rimless lightweight glasses in an attempt to disguise the fact that he had defective eyesight, rather than making a feature of it. “No libido-very good, Richard.” The man with the black-framed spectacles jabbed the air with his cigarette to emphasize his agreement. “That’s Edinburgh exactly.” Martin wanted to defend his home city but couldn’t quite work out how. It was true, Edinburgh didn’t have a libido, but why would you want to live in a city that did?
“Barcelona!” another of Richard’s friends shouted across the table (they were loud and not a little drunk), and the man with the old-fashioned but trendy spectacles barked back, “Rio de Janeiro!” And so the shouting of cities went on (“Marseille! New York!”) until they got to “Amsterdam!” and a row broke out over whether Amsterdam possessed its own libido or was “merely a locus for the exploitative commercial transactions of other people’s libidos.”
“Sex and capitalism,” Richard intervened languidly, “what’s the difference?” Martin waited for a punch line, but apparently there wasn’t one. Personally he thought there was a lot of difference between the two, but then he remembered undressing in front of Irina in that awful hotel room, with its view of the Neva and the cockroaches scuttling along the skirting boards. “Well-upholstered. Built for comfort, not for speed,” he’d joked, cringing with embarrassment.
“Da?” She laughed accommodatingly, apparently not understanding a word. The very remembrance of it made him double up as if he’d been hit by an invisible fist.
“Girls,” one of them said suddenly. “We should go and find some girls after this.”This idea was greeted with frightening enthusiasm.
“Pole dancing.” Richard sniggered like an adolescent boy.
“Oh, sorry, Martin,” another of them said. “Sorry to be so rampantly hetero.”
“Do you think I’m gay?” Martin asked, surprised. They all turned to look at him as if he’d said something interesting for the first time.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Martin,” Richard said. “Everyone’s gay.”
Martin would have argued with this ridiculous statement, but he had just discovered that he was chewing on a piece of chicken from his “vegetable biryani.” He removed it from his mouth as discreetly as he could and put it on the side of his plate. The last gristly remnant of some poor abused bird that had been pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and water in a foreign country. He could have wept for it.
“It’s okay, Martin,” Richard Mott said, slapping him on the back. “You’re with friends.”
Without asking him whether he wanted to go or not, Richard informed him that he had left a ticket for Martin for the radio showcase at the box office, but when Martin got to the venue, the indifferent girl behind the counter said to another indifferent girl, “Are there any comps in Richard Mott’s name?” The other girl made a face and glanced around while the first girl returned to glaring at her computer screen.
Martin found himself staring at a poster for Richard’s show. It was a close-up shot of Richard making a quirky face. A strapline running under it said, COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Martin thought that sounded off-putting rather than inviting.
When nothing more was forthcoming from either of the girls, Martin pointed out a rickety wooden dovecote on the wall at the back with names Sellotaped beneath each individual pigeonhole. The one that said “Richard Mott” contained a white envelope. The second indifferent girl read the name written on the envelope. “Martin Canning?” she asked suspiciously and then gave it to him without waiting for confirmation. He checked the tickets and found a scribbled note on one of them. “Your car’s parked in front of Macbet on Leith Walk. Cheers, R.”
“Can I go straight in?” he asked, and the first girl, without removing her eyes from her computer screen, said, “No, you have to join the queue.”
“Thanks,” he said, unacknowledged and invisible. And then he had joined the queue. And then the man with the baseball bat stepped out of the Honda.
7
Jackson fought his way up the Royal Mile, through the crowds and the tartan crap, until he finally gained the Castle, soaring almost Catharlike on top of the volcanic rock. He paid the entrance fee and walked along the Esplanade, past the towering scaffolded stands built for the Edinburgh Tattoo. “The Tattoo has a hundred percent box office,” Julia had told him enviously, and tickets were “like gold dust,” and yet within minutes of arriving in Edinburgh she had been given comps for the Tattoo by a complete stranger (claiming to be a piper, although Jackson saw no evidence of bagpipes). She tried to palm them off on Jackson, but he couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped for two hours in the dark and the summer damp watching a camp spectacle that had nothing to do with the reality of being in the military. “Don’t think of it as military,” Julia said. “Think of it as theatrical. Massed pipes and drums,” she said, reading from a program the so-called piper had given her, “and an army motorcycle stunt team. Highland dancers? And, oh, look, Russian Cossack dancers. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
Jackson couldn’t imagine Julia’s play having any kind of box office, couldn’t believe anyone would actually pay good folding money to see Looking for the Equator in Greenland.